Guix

Online Guix Day Conference: schedule released!

Guix Hackers — 14. Februar 2022

The Guix hackers are very happy to announce the second online Guix Days Conference on Saturday and Sunday, 19 & 20 February 2022. This conference is open to everyone (no registration fee) and will be held entirely online. Want to know the schedule, read on!

There will be no live talks during the Guix Days! Please watch the talks beforehand.

Join us live on the 19 and 20 to participate in the various sessions!

Live discussions will take place on Saturday and Sunday, and the agenda is the following (UTC+1, Paris time). Schedule is subject to change:

Saturday

• 10:00–10:35: (BoF) 10 years of Guix - a retrospective (tbd)
• 10:40–11:15: Making Images for AWS Lambda Functions and Deploying Them with Guix
• 11:20–11:55: Gaming on Guix

(break)

• 13:00–13:35: Spontaneous topics
• 13:40–14:15: A Deep Dive into the Guile Documentation & Makeover Proposal
• 14:20–14:55: Spontaneous topics

(break)

• 16:00–16:35: (BoF) WhereisEveryone, Guix 'R Us, Online Meetups
• 16:40–17:15: My experiences as a newcomer to Guix
• 17:20–17:55: How GNU Guix saved me when my laptop caught water, how it didn't, and where it couldn't

Sunday

• 10:00–10:35: (BoF) bordeaux.guix.gnu.org, Guix Build Coordinator and related topics Q&A
• 10:40–11:15: Dreaming of better patch review
• 11:20–11:55: Spontaneous topics

(break)

• 13:00–13:35: Modernizing python-build-system
• 13:40–14:15: (BoF) Guix Installer
• 14:20–14:55: Spontaneous topics

(break)

• 16:00–18:00: Future of Guix (tbd)

Each session will be question/answer and discussion related to the topic via the BigBlueButton instance.

The slots are short so please watch the videos beforehand to better enjoy the discussions. The term BoF means open discussion to address prospects. The last discussion may be longer depending on what you have to share.

The main channel for the day will be the video chat and questions will be asked via the chat hosted there or––because we love it––via #guix on libera.chat then the floor might be shared, opening more mics. The discussions will not be recorded because we would like to keep them informal––where people are less impressed to share their point of views.

The Code of Conduct applies for all the channels of communication.

10 years of Guix - a retrospective

Chaired by GNU Guix Maintainers

This session will present the various milestones reached by the project during the 10 years of its existence, from its first commit in 2012 to today, in 2022.

Making Images for AWS Lambda Functions and Deploying Them with Guix

Presented by George Vafeiadis and Phil Beadling. (video mkv)

AWS Lambda is an event driven, serverless compute service which is provisioned using custom-made Docker images. We were interested in seeing if we could harness Guix's Docker output to produce AWS compatible input images. Using Guix has enabled us to cut a lot of bulk out of the base image to produce a lean result. The talk will cover wrapping of the Lambda Python Runtime Interface Client in Guix, the various challenges in doing so, and an overview of the resulting pipeline that we can plug into our CI/CD system. We will provide example code and packages which people can then build upon (the ultimate aim is to submit these packages to the official Guix channel).

Gaming on Guix

Presented by Tobias Alexandra Platen. (video mp4)

This year the I Love Free Software Day 2022, includes Free Software games such as Veloren and Armagetron Advanced. Since I only play free software Games, I cant play VRChat, so I decided to go with V-Sekai instead, VR platform powered by the Godot Engine. I plan to package those games for GUIX.

A Deep Dive into the Guile Documentation & Makeover Proposal

Presented by Blake Shaw.

Recent discussions on the Guix mailing list revealed that many in the Guix community have found the Guile Reference Manual difficult to navigate as newcomers. That should come as no surprise — in PDF form, the docs span approximately 850 pages, making it a quite hefty set of documents for an implementation of a minimal programming language like Scheme, even when compared to the documentation of relatively large PLs; the Racket Guide, for instance, is only 450 pages, while the Rust Book is approximately 550 pages.

Serving at the same time as a reference manual & API specification, the large size may in part be attributed to what simultaneously makes Guile an appealing project to contribute to, while also rendering the documentation process somewhat delicate: Guile is a massive collective project featuring the contributions of many authors over the course of three decades, contributions which Guilers would hate to trivialize or treat as insignificant or edit away on a whim. Additionally, Guile comes from a long set of traditions within Scheme hacking which itself is deep with sage wisdom spanning many pedagogical philosophies and one of the greatest literature traditions of hacker culture. Is it possible to perform a makeover of the Guile Documentation while respecting these historical threads, at the same time rendering it more approachable for new users while not forsaking the deep nuggets of wisdom that lie therein?

WhereisEveryone, Guix 'R Us, Online Meetups

Chaired by jgart.

In this session I'll give an introduction and short tour of the WhereisEveryone community and associated Guix 'R Us channel. the session will cover how people can get involved with the project as well as how we see ourselves fitting into the scheme of contributing to GNU Guix upstream through regular online collaboration and organized meetups. The session is open to prospective as well as experienced Guix contributors alike. An open discussion will follow to discuss the strategies presented and how we might improve and extend them.

My experiences as a newcomer to Guix

Presented by John Kehayias. (video mp4)

Just over 6 months ago I had never heard of GNU Guix or knew what it was, and now I'm submitting patches and enjoy hacking on my Guix system constantly (and spending too much time on IRC). In this talk I will answer how I got here, what my experiences have been, and what I've learned as a newbie to not-quite-a-newbie.

I have been a Linux user for many years, from Debian in the early 32bit to 64bit era, to compiling kernels for a Gentoo media box, and more recently Arch as my full-time distro on 3 computers (yes, insert Arch meme). But now all I want is Guix on everything.

Along the way I had to learn what Guix is, how to use it, and how to hack on it. There are clear highlights like being able to use Scheme everywhere and the cleanliness of a declarative, atomic system, but also rough spots in a still growing distro and community, like adapting to mailing lists, patch review, and the "Guix way." I hope my perspectives will be interesting for other newcomers to learn from, as well as the more experienced Guix-ers to help continue the development of GNU Guix.

How GNU Guix saved me when my laptop caught water, how it didn't, and where it couldn't

Presented by Liliana Marie Prikler. (video mkv)

Based on events that actually occurred, this talk shows how to

1. use Guix on a foreign distribution to get a configuration made on Guix System running
2. use Guix' containerization to access files (and services) on a third machine without modifying data on that machine (e.g. gratuitously copying files to $HOME).

Guix is discussed as an alternative package manager similar to Flatpak or Snap, along with reasons to choose it over other solutions (particularly some "rarely" discussed UI reasons). In addition, practical applications of Guix' sandboxed environments are shown by the examples of

1. editing files with GNU Emacs while interacting with git through libsecret
2. reading mail and accessing remote files with GNOME Online Accounts.

For wider context, this talk shows how Guix can help creating manageable backups in the form of manifests.

bordeaux.guix.gnu.org, Guix Build Coordinator and related topics Q&A

Chaired by Christopher Baines.

bordeaux.guix.gnu.org is a relatively new addition to the default substitute servers, using the Guix Build Coordinator as a key component to build packages and provide substitutes.

This session will be a chance for live questions and discussion about bordeaux.guix.gnu.org, the Guix Build Coordinator and any related topics.

Dreaming of better patch review

Presented by Arun Isaac. (video mp4)

The Guix project is growing, and growing rapidly. Users and contributors are pouring in with their patches and bug reports. Maintainers, committers and reviewers are unable to keep up. A few (not me!) are taking on a disproportionate amount of the work. Contributors are frustrated that their patches don't get reviewed or accepted in time. Reviewers are cracking under the work load, and silently tuning out. This situation is obviously unsustainable, and demands urgent attention. What do we do?!

We try to motivate more of our reviewers to chip in, and gently encourage them to help out more. But, we all have busy lives, and it is impractical to appeal simply to the goodness of our hearts. We need to streamline our review process and make it so easy that reviewers will want to review. Suggestions to use more sophisticated and modern issue trackers such as those popularized by GitHub and GitLab come up time and again. But, I believe that Guix is a large enough and a distinctive enough project to deserve its own customized issue tracker tooling.

In this talk, I will dream up how our patch review could be better. I will describe problems and present mockups bereft of implementation. The hope is that this talk will outline the possibilities for future work and inspire people to pitch in with code. If there is time towards the end, I will also present mumi's new GraphQL API.

Modernizing python-build-system

Presented by Lars-Dominik Braun. (video mkv)

Python is moving away from having a single go-to solution for packaging. Setuptool’s well-known setup.py is currently in the process of being replaced by pluggable build systems as specified by PEP 517, allowing alternative tools like poetry, flit and others to enter the room.

Currently Guix’s python-build-system is not equipped to deal with packages that require a PEP 517-compatible build environment. Therefore they need custom 'build and 'install phases. Thus python-build-system needs to move forward as the ecosystem it is building. In this talk I would like to present my ideas for a modern Python build system.

Guix Installer

Chaired by Josselin Poiret.

This session will discuss the recent development in the installer.

Future of Guix

Chaired by GNU Guix maintainers.

The session covers the medium- and long-term goals that may or may not look realistic. Pragmatic dream!

Code of Conduct

This online conference is an official Guix event. Therefore, the Code of Conduct applies. Please be sure to read it beforehand!

If you witness violations of the code of conduct during the event, please email guix-days@gnu.org, a private email alias that reaches the organizers (Simon zimoun Tournier and Julien roptat Lepiller) and the GNU Guix maintainers.

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the Hurd or the Linux kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable and hackable through Guile programming interfaces and extensions to the Scheme language.